Heather's Great Big Little Orange Bird

I decided this year to start knitting Christmas presents. Also I had just been given a lot of wool and wanted to try fulling or felting. My first attempt was a knitted bag based on the pattern A Little Bird Told Me ... by Mags Kandis which appeared in the Knitty webzine in 2008 (Knitty is an absolute trove of free patterns)

The bag turned out a trifle larger than intended because of a last minute change of mind about knitting needles, but I'm pleased with the results.
For any Ravelry members the whole sorry story is available here for any non-Ravelry members I suggest you sign up. It's a marvellous community of knitters, crocheters and weavers.

I want one!

Yesterday the Guardian ran an April Fool story playing on Gordon Brown's (our current prime minister) recent trouble when a political writer revealed that he has a temper.

The essence of the joke is a mock campaign poster by the Labour Party exploiting Gordon's new hard man image and threatening "posh boy" David Cameron (leader of the opposition, who is wealthy and went to the posh school Eton)

The joke grew arms and legs when people started amending the poster on Flickr in the manner of the MyDavidCameron site with the (real) Tory campaign posters

John Prescott who is something of a leading light on Twitter then challenged the Guardian to produce a real Step Outside Posh Boy T-shirt, which they did, and they're running a competition tomorrow to win one of 100 T-shirts.

Today it snowed in London...

...and The Daily Mash in it's own inimitable style reported on the phenomenon:
(BTW - Carlisle is a city in England's frozen North, although this year that should be soggy North)

London Sacrifices Virgins after Centimetre of Snow

The soft South is renowned for coming to a halt as soon as a snowflake hits the ground

I could show you my favourite obsession... I've *NOT* been making a man with blond hair and a tan...

... I've been hatching scooters and hoofers!

I have a weakness for computer games. I can't work controllers and joysticks, I'm too tight for a Wii, (sounds like a continence problem) and I'm not fast enough for shoot-em-ups. However, I have blown hours on various types of solitaire (Pretty Good Solitaire www.goodsol.com 500 types of solitaire and the best) and spent ages playing match 3 games (diamond mine, jewel quest, fishdom) hidden object games and found my personal heaven in Big Fish Games. The only site that (almost) persuaded a miser like me to consider a subscription!

But now Big Fish have introduced a game that has ensured that my every free moment is spent in front of my computer and whenever I am away from it (to work, sleep, etc) I am thinking about it!

Faunasphere!

Faunasphere is a game designed for sad old ladies like me, according to the young guns who write reviews of those expensive console games everyone is being persuaded to fork out for at this time of year. But even those who've reviewed it are positive about it. It is a multi player web based game where the idea is to hatch an animal - a scooter(tortoise), hoofer(horse) or sniffer(dog) send it out into the world to grow, find food, fight pollution, and build a comfortable private world to live in. All the while if you like, you can interact with other players, make friends, and work together.

It has elements that will please various types of player, if you like to blast things the fauna have torches strapped to their back, or round their neck, that shoot out lightning and blast away pollution blocks, and some of those pollution blocks fight back! There are grades of pollution from inert blocks that just go when you shoot them, to nasties that fart on you when you try to kill, them via vileys that shield themsselves so they can overcome you with their fumes, up to the pollution monster itself that doesn't just fart! But if you don't have any aggression to work off you can pootle around the sphere, meeting up with other players, chatting, asking for and giving game tips, digging for treasure, hunting it from specific locations, accepting goals and carrying out specific tasks. If you prefer to use your design and homemaking skills you can design a private paradise for your Fauna to live in. If you are interested in genetic manipulation and breeding for specific traits you can breed your fauna through the generations to design for particular species, colours even eye and tail types. there are currently 12 species of fauna that can be bred from the original 3, and who knows there may even be more! I converted one of my hoofers to a squeaker (lemming) and one of my squeaker eggs hatched into a frog!

As a game it sucks you in, "I'll just play for a few more minutes, till I find this item, till I increase my level, till I see what's around this corner...

It's certainly better at "relieving my t-tension" than Rocky!

Fun in the garden

I have ordered myself some fruit trees and am ridiculously excited about them. I'm mad I know - anyone who believes 10% of what they say in a newspaper advert is being over optimistic, but I can't help it. When an envelope arrives with 5 fruit seeds instead of the five foot trees I'm expecting my bubble will burst but until then...

It's late October now, the clocks have changed and it gets dark at about 4:30, it's certainly pitch dark when I get home from work, so the only time I have to garden is at the weekend, unless I invest in some floodlighting

So if I want to clear a bit of the wilderness to receive these trees I have to do it this weekend hail, rain or shine and rain is what we've been promised. This morning I saw a gap in the clouds and decided to get cracking on the weeds, maybe clear a couple of feet of ground. So out I went and I actually found the weeds were coming up quite easily. The ground was quite loose and the fork was able to scoop the greenery off the top. For some reason the fork wouldn't go very deep into the ground though...

When I started to pay attention to what I was doing I realised the soil was very sandy here - and the barrier was a sheet of plastic (2 actually) I had discovered a sandpit! Complete with little plastic toys, a plastic rake and at least one melamine plate that didn't enjoy being buried for several years and had degraded into bits. My heart sank.

I would have to find the edges of the plastic layer, remove all the sand, pull out the plastic layer then dig up the base, and mix the sand back in (Is that a good idea for my trees?)

It took me 3 half hour sessions, the first to clear the weeds and assess the extent of the sandpit, the second to clear away about a third of the sand and start pulling up the plastic. At this point I took a photo break


The third was the most satisfactory. I focussed on shovelling sand and chucking it in a pile. On reflection it would have been wiser not to build the mountain on the edge of the plastic liner. I had to undermine my mountain to get the last of it out, but get it out I did. So now I have a hole, a sandy hill and no energy at all!


Now I just have to dig it all over and sit back and watch the weeds take over again

Your Teeth Are Fine But Your Gums Will Have To Come Out

I am a complete coward when it comes to dentists. I know it's irrational and they are gentle creatures who don't inflict pain without fully anaesthetising you first, but the thought of visiting one fills me with terror. This has had an adverse impact on my mouth as you can imagine ;)

A further complication is that the good old NHS has done something really weird with dentists contracts over the past 10 years or so with the result that NHS dentists are now as rare as hens' teeth and for some reason they are dead keen to remove you from their lists. There must be some benefit to them in being a rare species, maybe they get funding from the world wildlife fund or something.

Anyway, the key point being I had a right dose of toothache last weekend and on Monday discovered I had been de-registered by my dentist. The combination of pain, fear and having the means to end the pain taken away from me increased my stress levels dramatically. There followed a bit of slapstick concerning a single vacancy on my own dentist's list, an elderly couple waving a �20 deposit and a rush to the counter to try to secure the magic place on my behalf. They failed. I was out in the cold with panic gripping my heart.

Fortunately our Health Board has a fallback in place. You phone a number and tell the nice girl on the end the nature of your emergency and she arranges an emergency appointment for you with distressing speed. So by lunchtime on Monday I was heading off to a health centre in Galashiels, quivering in my boots and with no time to head to my doctor to try to extract a couple of tranqillisers from them. (I use them once every couple of years, only for dentists visits why are my doctors so reluctant to prescribe them?)

Anyway, the upshot of all this was I saw a nice young dentist (probably just out of college - why doesn't he have a proper practice? Don't think things like that Heather, he has the power of pain over you) who looked in my mouth very gently and pronounced the tooth is fine, there was nothing to be done. Relief? Horror? So what about this pain then? The problem is my bone is receding, and the tooth is coming loose, the roots are exposed and if anything touches the root it hurts. He packed a bit of filling around it but implied it was like putting a plaster on a gaping wound. I have to be careful with it and watch for food getting caught under there and it getting infected. If an abcess develops they will treat it and remove the tooth. But for now I can take paracetamol and wait for it to go away.

So I have been given official confirmation that my usual practice of ignoring things and hoping they go away is the correct action in this case. I'm surprised, every other episode of toothache I've had has been pain that escalates dramatically until a dentist makes it go away. Although this tooth did hurt during the summer and it did go away again, and currently it has reduced to a slight ache so here's hoping...

New Toy - Peg Loom

This week I got a new toy - a peg loom. I think you must call it something else in the USA because the only sites I've seen with a peg loom like this are British. It is a strip of wood with holes in it, into which sit a number of pegs. The pegs are weaving sticks, with holes at the end, a bit like blunt wooden needles.



You warp it up by threading the warp yarn through the holes at the end of the pegs and then standing the pegs up in the loom. My loom has a warp anchor bar to keep the warp yarn untangled, I threaded the pairs of threads through the bar and tied it off.



You weave your weft yarn (or rags or even raw fleece!) in and out the pegs until you have filled the pegs.



Then you lift out the pegs (a few at a time) and slide the fabric down the pegs onto the warp threads.



Then keep going, tie off the warp threads when you're all done and Voila!



Too small to be a blanket and too thick to be a table mat! Beautifully soft though and not bad for a first attempt. Now what can I turn it into?